what’s on the surface

Jul 16

Dear Reader,

When I meet with someone for the first time, I sometimes ask them to walk me through an ordinary Tuesday. What time they wake, what they reach for when they wake up, how the morning shapes up, or where the day tends to thin out or go sideways. These questions usually surprise people. They arrived ready to talk about the big things, and here I am asking about breakfast. But an ordinary day carries more information than almost anything else a person can tell me. The surface of a life is dense with evidence.

Most of us assume that self-understanding has to begin somewhere deep, that whatever is worth knowing about ourselves must be buried and hard to reach. So we skip the obvious. We treat the visible parts of our lives as background, too plain to hold any meaning. But the surface is where honest examination starts, because it's the one layer we can see without effort.

The visible facts of your life are available to anyone who cares to look, and you may be the person least likely to look at them. Familiarity is its own kind of camouflage. Consider what your calendar actually holds, the route you drive without quite deciding to, and the subjects you return to when nothing requires you to say anything at all.

This is where a year of examination begins, at the surface, with what anyone could see. So this week, try describing one of your ordinary days as if you were telling a kind stranger. Notice what you'd include and what you'd leave out. You don't need to draw conclusions yet. The noticing is the work, and interpretation can wait.

Living intentionally means letting yourself see what has been in plain sight all along, and trusting that what you find there is worth your attention.

Yours in the journey,